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Overview of Incident Lifecycle in SRE

by Squadcast.com

Originally published on Squadcast.com.

Incidents that disrupt services are unavoidable. But every breakdown is an opportunity to learn & improve. This blog is a deep dive into best practices to follow across the lifecycle of an incident, helping teams build a sustainable and reliable product - the SRE way

Service disruptions are inevitable, but each incident offers a chance to learn and improve. This blog delves into best practices for managing incidents throughout their lifecycle, aiding teams in building sustainable and reliable products through SRE Incident Management.

Every problem can be a blessing in disguise. Similarly, incidents in system infrastructure provide valuable insights into system architecture capabilities. This understanding helps organizations create more sustainable and reliable products.

In this blog, we break down the complexities of incident management into a structured format, aiming to help you handle every incident effectively using SRE Incident Management principles.

What is an incident?

According to ITIL 2011, an incident is defined as "an unplanned interruption to an IT service, a reduction in the quality of an IT service, or a failure of a Configuration Item that has not yet impacted an IT service but has the potential to do so." To maintain acceptable service levels, it is crucial to resolve incidents and restore normal services promptly.

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What is the lifecycle of an incident?

ITIL defines a standard lifecycle of an incident. While the actual activities that occur during each phase have changed over time, it is still a good starting point for a detailed description of incidents.

  • Incident Identification, Logging, and Categorisation

Incidents can be identified through monitoring systems or manually. Once identified, incidents are logged. An incident log ensures all incidents are addressed and helps identify trends. The incident is then categorized with details such as severity, functional area, and ownership. While these tasks were traditionally handled by first-level monitoring technicians, they are now typically automated in SRE Incident Management.

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  • Incident Notification, Assignment, or Escalation

This phase involves notifying the appropriate personnel to address the incident. In complex environments, identifying the right responders can be challenging. Many organizations have detailed escalation processes to bring in specialists or SMEs when needed. Modern incident management systems, especially those focused on SRE Incident Management, can automate these processes to reduce response times.

  • Incident Investigation and Diagnosis

Once notified, incident responders gather information about the incident using observability tools. In addition to the current state of the system, RCAs of similar incidents in the past can provide valuable insights. This data helps build a hypothesis about the probable cause of the incident and guides the decision on a fix. Effective SRE Incident Management often relies on these investigative steps to ensure thorough understanding and resolution.

  • Incident Resolution

The responder team implements the proposed fix and monitors the system to confirm the incident has been resolved. It may take several iterations of trial and error before the issue is fully resolved. Each attempt provides additional information, refining the hypothesis and leading to more effective solutions. This iterative process is a key aspect of SRE Incident Management, helping teams continuously improve their response strategies.

Note: The OODA Loop

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The description of the phases of an incident gives the impression of a structured, systematic engineering process that is calmly applied by experts. However, reality is rarely so neat and clean. Incidents, particularly major ones, are more akin to a battle than an engineering process. Everyone is under pressure, failure has catastrophic consequences and there is always insufficient information to understand what is really happening.

It is appropriate, therefore, that the best way to respond to such situations was determined by the military: the OODA loop. Originally conceived to guide fighter pilots’ decision-making during dogfights, it has since been adopted by many industries as a framework for handling crisis situations.

The OODA loop requires the responder to:

  • Observe: gather available information about the situation

  • Orient: relate that information to existing knowledge, experience, and skills

  • Decide: make a hypothesis about the situation, that is, decide the probable cause

  • Act: Apply the corrective measure suggested by the hypothesis

  • Loop: Feedback results of the action to step one and repeat until resolution.

  • Incident Closure

An incident is marked closed once confirmation is received that normal services have resumed. Confirmation can come from various sources such as monitoring systems, the development or operations team, and end users. A crucial part of incident closure is deciding and logging follow-up actions. This usually involves a postmortem that includes an RCA and a process review of the incident. The process review generates follow-up steps to improve the SRE Incident Management process. The RCA determines if:

    • A permanent fix is needed
    • Preventative maintenance is required to avoid similar incidents
    • Cleanup of any artifacts created by the incident or troubleshooting is necessary

The incident lifecycle provides a clear picture of the various activities an incident management team follows when dealing with an incident. Now, let's explore best practices to make incident management less stressful activity.

What are some of the best practices in incident management?

The ITIL incident lifecycle offers a framework for handling incidents, but best practices come from extensive practical experience. This section focuses on keeping an incident management team productive with a structured approach. These practices can greatly enhance team efficiency and prevent burnout.

  • 1. Recursive Delegation of Roles and Responsibilities

The first step is to distribute the work among all team members. Effective incident handling requires clear awareness of who is responsible for what tasks. Adequate information about each individual's roles and responsibilities helps them make key decisions independently. Basic roles in incident management include:

    • Incident Commander: The lead member who delegates work to the task force.
    • Operational Work Team: Responsible for executing all operational procedures to resolve an incident as quickly as possible.
    • Communication Team: Communicates the status of the incident to other team members and stakeholders, maintaining and updating an incident document with accurate information.
    • Planning Team: Plans handoffs and monitors system infrastructure before and after an incident. They also handle long-term issues like filing bugs and restoring the system to normal once the incident is resolved.

These best practices in SRE Incident Management help streamline processes, improve collaboration, and minimize downtime.

  • How does Incident Command System Work?

The incident command system was initially developed in 1968 by a fire disaster response team to delegate roles and responsibilities among team members. It has since been adopted for managing incidents in software and cloud infrastructure systems. The framework of incident response revolves around the three 'C's, the goals of effective incident management:

    • Coordination in incident response efforts
    • Communication across the incident team, stakeholders, and customers
    • Controlling all efforts of incident response and management

This system emphasizes the delegation of roles within an incident management team.

  • 2. Centralized and Well-Defined War Room for Incident Response Taskforce

This stage involves setting up a designated war room, a centralized space where team members can coordinate to resolve incidents more quickly. The team can use Slack, telephone, or video conferencing to maintain and record communication logs related to incident traffic and alerts, essential for effective SRE Incident Management.

  • 3. Maintaining a Live (Real-time) Incident State Document

In this stage, the incident commander maintains a concurrent live incident document where all details of the incident are diligently recorded. This document can be hosted on a wiki and must be accessible to all team members, enabling them to contribute data about the incident. This practice ensures transparency among team members and stakeholders, a critical aspect of SRE Incident Management.

  • 4. Live Handoff across Incident Management Team

This occurs when incident responders need to change during an ongoing incident, either because their shift has ended or they are exhausted. Seamless handoff includes transferring all work, overall status, progress of investigation, or corrective actions to the new team. A real-time incident state document is invaluable for this process, ensuring continuity and efficiency in SRE Incident Management.

  • 5. Incident Management Strategy and Best Practices

Implementing effective incident management strategies is crucial for reducing mean time to recovery and minimizing stress for the incident management team. Key practices include:

    • Prioritization of work
    • Team preparation
    • Autonomy for each role
    • Introspection
    • Arranging alternatives
    • Practice and role changes

These strategies enhance SRE Incident Management, making the process more efficient and less stressful

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  • 6. Postmortems and RCAs

After significant incidents, conducting a postmortem is essential. Key outcomes of a good postmortem include:

    • Corrective or Preventive Actions: Implementing permanent fixes and preventive measures to ensure the incident does not reoccur. For example, fixing a bug and increasing system capacity to prevent high load levels.
    • Lessons Learned: Applying technical insights from the incident to other parts of the system. For instance, a misconfigured load balancer issue in the inventory module could be relevant to the reporting system.
    • Process Improvements: Making changes to improve overall incident handling. For example, logging all configuration changes in the incident log.

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  • Postmortem Best Practices

  • Blameless postmortems
    Focusing on what went wrong rather than assigning blame allows for a more objective analysis and encourages participants to address the circumstances contributing to errors.

  • Track and Reward Outcomes:
    Ensuring postmortems generate results by tracking and rewarding closed action items, improved reliability, process changes, and postmortem ownership.

  • - Encourage Transparency:
    Sharing postmortem lessons organization-wide through notifications, cross-team reviews, and regular reports helps ensure that all teams benefit from the insights gained.

  • Address Postmortem Culture Failures
    immediate action is needed if the postmortem culture shows signs of failure, such as assigning blame, insufficient time for postmortems, repeating incidents, or unresolved action items.

Conclusion

Incidents are common and should be managed using a standard approach. ITIL provides a solid template, and the following practices can enhance the effectiveness of SRE Incident Management:

    • Maintain a clear line of command
    • Delegate roles and responsibilities to resolve incidents quickly
    • Record all actions during debugging and mitigation
    • Declare active incidents early and delegate roles for effective collaboration
    • Establish a framework for incident response processes and procedures
    • Keep best practices for incident response handy to avoid deviations
    • Conduct postmortems and RCAs to learn from incidents and prevent recurrence

This blog aims to provide a deeper understanding of best practices throughout the incident lifecycle, enabling efficient handling of critical incidents in your organization.

What you should do now* Schedule a demo with Squadcast to learn about the platform, answer your questions, and evaluate if Squadcast is the right fit for you.

Avatar for Squadcast.com Squadcast.com
on September 2, 2024
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